Converged infrastructures are collections of compute, storage, network, and software resources that may be acquired, serviced, and supported as single assemblies. For example, a corporate IT (Information Technology) manager can purchase a single converged infrastructure system rather than having to purchase, assemble, and deploy separate computing servers, storage arrays, networking switches, associated software, and so on.
Hyper-converged infrastructures, or “HCI's,” are converged infrastructures that provide additional integration at the sub-assembly level. For example, a hyper-converged system may include servers that perform multiple roles, such as any combination of compute, storage, and networking.
FIG. 1 shows an example of one prior HCI arrangement. Here, multiple client machines (e.g., user computers or devices) 110(1) to 110(N) access a system 122 over a network 120. The system 122 includes a local area network (LAN) 130 and multiple nodes. Five nodes 140(1) to 140(5) are shown. Each node is seen to include one or more processors (e.g., CPUs) and runs one or more applications, e.g., for servicing requests arriving over the network 120 from any of clients 110(1) to 110(N) and/or for performing other functions. Each of the nodes 110(1) to 110(N) includes its own local attached storage and employs a “share nothing” architecture, in which the processor and attached storage resources on each node are private to that node. To enable the nodes 110(1) to 110(N) to function together in a cluster, each node includes a file system component (FS Cmp). The file system components of the nodes together form a shared file system, with the file system component on each node communicating over the LAN 130 with the file system component on each of the other nodes to maintain a shared file system image and a single namespace across all of the nodes.